The traditional means for buying and selling property and in particular real estate in the United States is often through a formidable and archaic series of steps and documentation. The process is structured such that the real negotiation and optimization of the results for both buyers and sellers is lost in the often legally required paper mill. A more dynamic market has emerged for some categories of personal property and services through such services as e-bay®, ticketmaster®, Travelocity® and others. A problem with these on-line bidding processes is they typically do not enable dynamic two-way interactions between buyers and sellers and do not make use of the information generated by the buyer and seller interactions.
There have been numerous attempts to update the real-estate selling processes through placing the documents and transfer of documents into electronic on-line systems. But none have made use of the potential interactive nature of online purchasing to change and measure the dynamics of the process. Sellers are still represented by agents and presented offers from, in some cases, automatically pre-qualified buyers, and, buyers present offers, perhaps electronically but still using intrinsically the same paper based manual procedures. Neither party receives quick feedback on whether the market supports such an offer or whether this is the best deal that might be available to either party. The offers and acceptance process is typically a one step at a time process extending over hours or perhaps days.
Broerman (U.S. Pat. No. 6,594,633) and Mini (U.S. Pat. No. 6,684,196) describe real estate computer network that automates the paper process. The transaction includes the traditional offers and counter offers albeit now facilitated by an electronic transmission of the information. There have been a couple of attempts to create systems to automatically match sellers and qualified buyers. Fraser (U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,115) describes a system where a database of buyer information is matched against a database of seller qualification requirements and communicates those with minimum qualifying matches for their properties to the sellers. This would be similar to pre-qualifying for a real estate loan, adding that to a resume and selectively broadcasting the resume to the sellers. Chin (U.S. Pat. No. 7,016,866) adds weighted demographic criteria to the screening process to provide a score for a buyer indicative of a match to the sellers' ideal buyer. Although automating a paper process, the current systems do not take advantages of the dynamics and real time aspects offered by an electronically connected network. None of these systems provide a change to the dynamics of the process. None of these systems provide anything new to help buyers and sellers to optimize their choices based upon real time feedback of supply and demand for their property.
There is a need for a process to match buyers and sellers that gives buyers a chance to test dynamically their ability to negotiate an acceptable price on a property within a field of available properties including such factors as competing buyers. There is a need for a system and process for sellers to be able to assess demand for their property and properly set asking prices. There is a need for a system and process to provide real time market demand information for properties that is measured and updated on a time scale consistent with the factors affecting the market rather than dictated by the time scale required for manual transaction methods.